Remember the 2008 election campaign? The financial markets were going crazy, and banks that were "too big to fail" were bailed out by the government. Smug EU officials proclaimed that all was well within the EU—even while they were bailing out a number of financial institutions. Fast forward to 2012, and the EU is looking at hard times. Greece can't pay its debt. Italy can, but the markets don't trust it to be able to. Spain and Portugal are teetering around like toddlers just waiting for the market to give them one good push. Members of the public are behaving like teenagers, screaming "F**k you," while flipping the bird. The markets are reacting like drunk parents, and the resulting bruises are going to take a while to heal.

In all of this, uninformed idiots blame the Greeks for being lazy, the Germans for being too strict, and everyone but themselves. Newspapers, blogs, and television are filled with wise commentary hailing the return of the gold standard, the breakup of the Euro, or any number of sensible and not-so-sensible ideas. How are we to parse all this information? Do any of these people know what they are talking about? And if anyone does, how can we know which ones to listen to? The research of Dunning and Kruger may well tell us there is no way to figure out the answers to any of these questions. That is kind of scary.

It has been more than 10 years since Dunning and Kruger published their work. I suspect it has become required reading in psychology courses. It's also a paper that has important implications for learning and communication, so what has happened since? Have the results held up? Are they universal? And what can we do to avoid falling victim to our own inabilities?

"The paper gave voice to an observation that people make about their peers, but that they don’t know how to express," Dunning said.

This paper has become a cult classic. It is well-written—humor interspersed with robust data, and conclusions that are discussed in a thorough and accessible way. I wondered if Dunning knew that this paper would become such a classic, and when I spoke with him he responded quite to the contrary. "I frankly thought the paper would never be published," Dunning said. "It really doesn’t fit the usual structure of a modern-day research psychology finding. A wise editor who got it and good reviewers showed me wrong there. I am struck just with how long and how much this idea has gone viral in so many areas."

Clearly, the paper struck a chord with many people outside of the field of psychology. "I presume the paper gave voice to an observation that people make about their peers but that they don’t know how to express," Dunning responded. If you have not read the paper already, I recommend doing so.

Unfortunately, in those places ruled by the smug and complacent, a classic paper has become a weapon. The findings of Dunning and Kruger are being reduced to "Stupid people are so stupid that they don't know they are stupid." Rather bluntly, Dunning himself said, "The presence of the Dunning-Kruger effect, as it’s been come to be called, is that one should pause to worry about one’s own certainty, not the certainty of others." And that humorously suggests the Dunning-Kruger effect is now a candidate to become a second Godwin's law.

Like Dunning, I do not take such a dim view of humanity. In fact, Dunning-Kruger and follow-up papers give us cause for hope. They show that people are not usually irredeemably stupid. You can teach people to accurately self-evaluate—though, in their specific examples, this also involved teaching them the very skill they were trying to evaluate.

Context is everything

It is important to realize that the Dunning-Kruger paper was not such a shocking finding. It was, for instance, already known that seemingly everyone evaluates themselves as above average in everything. Are you a better driver than average? Certainly am. How do you rate your ability at math? Oh, a little better than average. How about mountain climbing? Well, I've climbed the local hill a couple of times. I bet Kilimanjaro can't be much more difficult.

A large pile of research on various groups of people, covering various skill sets, indicates that in the face of all evidence, humans are irredeemably optimistic about their own abilities. That is, by itself, not such a bad thing. The ugly side shows up when we also realize that the norm must be maintained. Studies show that we do this by considering that everyone else is much worse. Being clueless about your own abilities is one thing. Misjudging other's abilities is relatively more serious.

In short, to pick a good expert on a given topic, I need some expertise on the topic. The Internet can help with this, since a large number of biologists would tell you that Richard Dawkins is a reliable source of information on evolution, and very few would point you in the direction of Michael Behe. In other words, in aggregate, is the Internet always right? Umm, yeah, I think I'll take a pass on that.

This is a topic that is of interest to Dunning. "Our own recent work shows that, yes, you need experts to spot experts," he said. "Everyone can spot the poor performer, but often spotting the best performers is beyond the competence of the group.

This small part was the most interesting to me out of this extremely interesting and well written article (Thanks Chris!!!).

Two questions:

1) Is this quote from an interview of Dunning or does he say this somewhere else? I didn't see it in his linked paper "Unskilled and Unaware of It".

2) It seems to me that Chris didn't want to give an opinion on whether or not people in group and judge whether or not someone is an expert - any other opinions on this?

"I'm sealed in a reinforced concrete room with no exit. I have a piece of wood and a saw, how do I escape?"

The 'guess what I'm thinking' answer:

"Cut the wood in half, put both pieces together, two pieces make a whole! I ESCAPE THROUGH THE HOLE!"

Followed by a smug grin, and a statement that programming is about 'thinking outside the box' (box here meaning logic, I suppose).

I would have thought the correct answer was, "since you're the one trapped in there, I want you to saw your face off and beat your head against the concrete until your skull collapses." I guess that might not get me the job, though.

No exit? Just leave through the entrance. I can has programming job now plx?

The worry about needing expertise to recognize expertise reminds me of Meno's Paradox: "And how will you inquire into a thing when you are wholly ignorant of what it is? Even if you happen to bump right into it, how will you know it is the thing you didn't know?"

Greece can't pay its debt. Italy can, but the markets don't trust it to be able to. Spain and Portugal are teetering around like toddlers just waiting for the market to give them one good push. Members of the public are behaving like teenagers, screaming "F**k you," while flipping the bird. The markets are reacting like drunk parents, and the resulting bruises are going to take a while to heal.

I think this is the best description I've read yet of what's going wrong in the markets right now. Well done!

I personally found that and the earlier piece of 'journalism' regarding the approach Europe (a huge collection of nations and culture) took towards the financial collapse and toxic debt from American/International banking institutions to be almost an ideal representation of the effect outlined in the research. Not sure that is good news for the author if he believes his writing on economics is strong.

In today's world, where there seems to be a universal dearth of common sense, I might modify the premise -- "Experts" are so clueless that they don't know they are clueless. One sees this in economics, politics, journalism, health, selected areas of science and engineering, and education at all levels -- particularly at the university level.

One of my primary axioms is: "Consider the source". It is simply a fact of modern life that one has to constantly evaluate what one reads -- weighing the content against other sources and what one thinks of the author's judgment. Fortunate, with the Internet, we can easily find alternative viewpoints. It is up to the individual to formulate a suitable opinion on a particular subject.

So while Dunning and Kruger might have a point about individual self-assessment, I think it more important that the individual be good at "group-assessment" -- being able to recognize BS from the "experts".

I suppose the general principle to draw from this is: "Most real-world phenomena are more complex than your mental models which approximate those phenomena. Try to avoid discarding evidence which might lead you to refine your mental models."

In today's world, where there seems to be a universal dearth of common sense, I might modify the premise -- "Experts" are so clueless that they don't know they are clueless. One sees this in economics, politics, journalism, health, selected areas of science and engineering, and education at all levels -- particularly at the university level.

Or, that today, there's so much information overload, no one SEEMS to be as much of an expert as people in the past. I'm sure that for every Lincoln, though (and I know he's not 100% good guy, etc), there were 5 or 10 totally inept, bungling local politicians. We've just never heard about those, because they've been lost in time...

I'm sure that when the stock market was a few hundred companies and Standard Oil, trades took minutes, not microseconds, and only a few people could trade it was a LOT easier to predict than today.

I'm sure a population of 100 million is easier to manage than 300 million. And most of those 100 million didn't have a voice anyway, and didn't know how badly off they were. Probably a similar effect: the less you know about the lifestyles of the opulent, the less you worry about it..

That was a superb article, and brought up many very interesting and subtle points. Thank you for the excellent work.

A flip-side of this is that those who want to really learn and generate *new* expertise have to become comfortable with feeling foolish. http://jcs.biologists.org/content/121/11/1771An overly-simplified model (and I am aware that it is!):If you think you know something thoroughly, then you probably have little knowledge and are stagnant.If you find yourself perpetually struggling with your own ignorance, then you are probably learning rapidly.

I'd love to see an evaluation of how this would interact with decision making in game theory. .. I was gonna write a little note about my expectations of it, but it kept growing beyond the scope of a comment, and will likely end up pretty complicated.

Crackhead Johny wrote:

I think this mostly comes down to one's ability to think critically. If one is a critical thinker and is confronted with a completely unfamiliar situation the first thing they want is more info. A non thinker may simply make the decision and then make their own "facts" to back it up.

Subtly reinforced by the cultural 'heroes' we're presented with in our entertainment.

There tend to be two types of heroes: ultra-confident, or ultra-competent.

1) The ultra-confident use that confidence as a shield. Nothing they do can be wrong because they -know- they are right. "If you just believe in yourself, things will work out for the best." There's a common 'train to get stronger' sequence so that they can improve physically, but physical comparisons are usually trivial: if the enemy can beat you, you're not strong enough. There's no real self-evaluation needed.

2) The ultra-competent don't need to get better; they're -already- better than (almost) anyone else. The difficulties for them are obstructions outside themselves (see any legal/political/forensic/detective shows in the last decade), not their own flaws (unless it involves romantic relationships).

The confident ones don't have to get better because their actual competence level doesn't matter (though it will tend to be at the high end regardless, or start low but be trivially easy to get to the top end). You don't have to justify any decision beforehand; the results are what determine whether you were right (and of course the hero is always right).

The competent ones don't have to get better because they're already at the top. They also don't have to justify themselves to the lesser mortals unless they feel like explaining things to the audience. Their expertise is beyond question, and the experts will never be wrong.

So now the non-heroic audience gets the following message: Whatever the 'experts' told you is right, and you never have to think critically about it because simple confidence and an unwillingness to change your mind will win the day. In that environment, learning becomes counterproductive, since it leads to self-doubt and lack of confidence, which puts you that much further away from being a 'hero'.

Of course the above is all just what I could throw together of my musings in a short time, is subject to inaccuracies and generalizations, and would be better served by someone who's put more research into this than I have (which is basically none). I can already poke plenty of holes in what I just wrote, but there's a limit to how much time one can spend on such things.

@Kinemaxx Interesting. Makes me think of the 'fish-out-of-water' trope as an alternative to the commonality you describe, the extreme examples being Forrest Gump, Being There, Pink Panther, etc., and other tropes like undiscovered talent and magical abilities and uncommon luck, which seem common in hopeful message stories aimed at children. And now, like you, my head may explode with tangents.....So, thanks for that.

I suppose the general principle to draw from this is: "Most real-world phenomena are more complex than your mental models which approximate those phenomena. Try to avoid discarding evidence which might lead you to refine your mental models."

I think it is well recognized that what Dunning-Kruger opened up needs more work.

That said, I somewhat ironically have always taken these types of speculative what-ifs a sure sign of imagining competence and knowledge, personal and domain related, where there is very little as of yet.

What we do know is that, while it is likely that if we are not competent we will overestimate competence, we will likely underestimate competence in areas of competence.

This doesn't lead to the conclusion that we can't say that incompetents are incompetent at spotting their incompetence (here expressed as "stupid people are so stupid that they don't know they are stupid").

Nor does it lead to the conclusion that"everyone (including you and me) is likely to overestimate our abilities", since that depends on how non-critically you try to assess abilities beyond those where you are _sufficiently_ competent. (The large domain where our assessment correlates well with others as well as independent techniques, say course grading, on our competence.) If you are critical, you tend to avoid that until later. "Don't (yet) know" is an empirically legitimate response.

smyers313 wrote:

And now, let's read through the interweb comments, where a bunch of people who don't know anything think they're experts.

That is a deepity. The problem for you is that this is a new and little researched area, so there are no "experts" as of yet.

When you consider that I am unlikely to be able to pick grammatical errors out of a Dutch sentence, it is impossible for me to evaluate my own, or anyone else's, performance. I simply do not have the skills to do so. And, since I can't read or hear the errors of others, I cannot accurately place myself in the hierarchy of competence. Couple that with the fact that I think I am not stupid, and I am likely to severely overestimate my abilities.

This rings so true with a lot of the English learners I teach. I often find students would place themselves above others in the class even if they score poorly because "their" English is better. These are students that often have trouble correcting errors (for practice or otherwise) in class, yet are quick to try and correct others that are speaking correctly. Since becoming a language teacher, this is something I've quickly learned to ID and fix. Then, I have my good students that are comparing themselves to native speakers and saying their English is terrible, yet they are scoring 85% or higher on every test. This article has been a great read. I plan on printing it out and leaving it in the breakroom at my work. I'm sure many of the other teachers will enjoy reading it!

No surprise that the DK effect was immediately demonstrated in the Comments wrt linguistics and economics. QED, indeed.

Not wishing to go OT overmuch, to those doubting there is a way to separate the wheat from the chaff in economics, might I recommend delving into the Great Depression as a way to find historical precedent. Or, more easily, try identifying what changes in law, rolling back depression-era regulations, brought about the S&L crisis at the end of the 1980's.

The econ itself isn't nearly as hard as identifying why this time around we are unable fix things. That's a lot scarier.

I suggest that anything that leads one to forget how damnably little they will ever know, is the enemy. (except the occasional good drunk or fantastic shag)

Of course we all start in innocent ignorance of our own ignorance, but that will hopefully be surmounted quickly (and truly pity those who never escape it). Beyond that, take care with all education, which has a tendency to over-impress the educated with how much they have accomplished. Remember that everything we will every accomplish, all we will ever learn, is but a mote in this universe, forever to be dwarfed by the unknown, and be humble. Better to hold with vigilance to the premise that everything we know is probably wrong, or at best a transitory truth, and be glad when it even works at all, than to think ourselves masters of anything, ever.

But we should be honest here, and remember too that much of this problem is simple egotism. Unfounded and undeserved as ever it usually is. Hunt your own ego with bloody intent to kill, and bring lots of ammo, if you intend ever to catch a clear glimpse through to the real person below.

Not wishing to go OT overmuch, to those doubting there is a way to separate the wheat from the chaff in economics, might I recommend delving into the Great Depression as a way to find historical precedent. Or, more easily, try identifying what changes in law, rolling back depression-era regulations, brought about the S&L crisis at the end of the 1980's.

The econ itself isn't nearly as hard as identifying why this time around we are unable fix things. That's a lot scarier.

I am no expert, and I give the following thoughts only as hopefully interesting food for thought:

- The Great Depression, and all the law since, may be of limited reference value, because too many factors have since changed. This includes many factors that had practically no relation to those earlier circumstances but are critical factors now.

- Oil, coal and gas, we are at or near world peak production, with rapidly rising demand. Also applies to most other resources, we are at real physical limits on many fronts. This is a simple physical situation with broad and deep impact on everything, but with no historical parallel.

- There are now 7 billion of us, with all the accompanying complexity, again unprecedented and tangibly different from times past.

- Why can't we fix it this time? COMPLETE CORRUPTION. We don't even have public laws now, or governments, or public interest. We have selfishly designed corporate policy, now enacted in place of our governments, after decades of carefully designed lobbying and political efforts. We have corruption in place of public policy. And of course, those forces are in competition, in perpetual war with each other. They see market chaos as opportunity. The public has no real say in the matter any more, and we peons are the only ones for whom it's broken. Of course the big player losers will whine once in a while too, and ask for bailouts (why not), but they don't want real change.

This has been a haunting subject throughout my life and connects directly to what I consider to be mankind's worst enemy: Deceptive 'Truth'. Instead of tossing out an essay on the subject, here are a couple of my relevant personal sayings:

• Diversity Rules.• We never know everything about anything.

Regarding the evaluation of what makes a good manager, at this point in time where our business schools rarely teach about actual 'capitalism', our economy is suffering in the long term from dire managerial incompetence. The MBA degree graduates are not only a dime-a-dozen. They are almost uniformly incompetent at positive business practices. Instead they are experts at self-destructive business practices. Thus our economy and general business community fails.

The one system that taught me an important basis of management evaluation came from Dr. Tony Alessandra.

I was able to attend one of his classes while working at Eastman Kodak. His system is called "The Platinum Rule." Over the years he as modified the system, possibly to mollify people working in marketing. But the general concept remains the same. In brief, he focuses on three personality groups. The first group is the Producers. These are the people who make things. They tend to fit the Type A personality concept. They tend not to be personable, instead focusing on getting things done at the expense of relationships. They also tend to considerably upset the second group, the Relationals. They tend to fit the Type B personality concept. They are all about human relations and tend not to be about getting things done. They tend to upset the Producers, but good Producers recognize the importance of Relational people. However, Relational people often have a remarkable blind spot regarding Producers to the point where they are renowned for becoming so upset with Producers that they undermine and destroy them.

The third group Dr. Alessandra considers is the Management group. These people have a good grasp of both Types A & B personality traits. They are capable of producing while being relational. They are the translators between the Producers and the Relationals. If managers veer too closely to either the Producer or Relational approach in their work, they become less useful and potentially more dangerous to the success of the business.

Extrapolating from Dr. Alessandra's concepts, using Eastman Kodak's failures as experience, I created my own concept that I call Marketing-As-Management. When this occurs, marketing people, aka the Relationals, have worked and schmoozed their way into management. Once they are there, they deliberately demolish the Producers in the company, such as the R&D departments. Also, rather oddly, Marketing-As-Management tends to create what I consider to be The Spirit of the Age in business, that being what I call The Black Rule: Abuse Thy Customer. Once a company's customers is cheering for the company's demise, they are as good as dead. This happened at Kodak. This is happening with the US federal government.

The cure for Marketing-As-Management is a deliberate return to an entrepreneurial or Producer approach within the company. Apple pulled this off when Steve Jobs returned to the company. Sony is failing at this step with the promotion of a marketing executive as CEO. Steve Jobs was known to speak at length about this phenomenon.

My thoughts are in western society in general, ambition and self confidence is favoured over competence for promotion. In my experience this is the crux of the problem. The people at the top have an overconfidence in their ability to evaluate workers they don't understand. This environment makes things more of a blame game, and not as important to understanding what went wrong. This environment isolates the incompetence allowing it to flourish, because it becomes about not getting in trouble. Many times I have seen someone competent comes in and try to get stuff done - he will stick his neck out to try to get things done and when eventually something will go wrong the competent will be thrown out of the group. There is a social aspect to it also.

And now, let's read through the interweb comments, where a bunch of people who don't know anything think they're experts.

Most of the staff at Gizmodo come to mind. Peggy Hill too.

Not so sure about that. I've been experimenting with presenting myself as an expert in my chosen field of which I know I'm at the bottom. People outside seem to be willing to pay me to do my mediocre work and pay me as if it were special. Maybe the above named are doing that for a living.

It has been a source of frustration for me that my knowledge has been just enough to know I need more skills to be successful at IT, when I see people that are truly ignoramuses just 'doing it' and people in awe of their expertise.

<long story containing obfuscating terms> Just describes a logical fallacy in action.

gimfred wrote:

I got involved in a polarizing political Australian discussion in which my associate noted that even the Liberal party's much lauded economic expert (Costello) noted the current Liberal leader has no economic nuance. The Liberal supporter (LNP) tried to turn that around by asking what Costello thought of the Australian Labor Party's leaders (ALP). LNP was adamant that what Costello thought of ALP was important.

My colleague even pointed out that it would be like a retired footballer & vocal supporter of team X criticizing a team Y. Of course they are going to dismiss the opposing sides position. But LNP couldn't seem to see the irrelevance, to the point of declaring the LNP the 'winner'. Even tried to 'teach' me how to debate. I just sat there thinking, "You've kicked an own goal and want to teach me?"

</ long story>

I freely admit to being oblivious to matters regarding economy (as well as multiple other areas). It frustrates me when people who are no better than me are listened to despite the failing rather generic tests.

But then they are succeeding if you count success as who is being listened to. So maybe blustering your way through is the way to succeed, for those of us whom did not spend our youth perfecting the necessary skills.

The author actually gets it horribly wrong in one respect: he has no idea how to find an expert.

The problem with his proposed method - references - is that it is subject to a cascading failure of precisely the phenomenon discussed in the article. You have people with an overly high regard for their expertise that form a self-reinforcing group.

By the author's methods, parapsychology is a valid science. After all, pretty much every expert in parapsychology agrees it's a valid field. It's only those non-expert skeptics who criticize it.

Actually identifying expertise requires that you examine process. Experts are wrong all the time. But they're wrong in the "right" way. Their process is a functional one that could potentially lead to valid results.

It's a better explanation for why people think businesses are more efficient than governments.

It might help to understand the concept of 'creative destruction'. When you look at 'business' in aggregate, you've got an essentially evolutionary process. Inefficient businesses fail, while efficient businesses thrive (to simplify a great deal). Because of the cutthroat competition they face, this process yields a result where the best businesses at any given time are far more efficient than an organization that doesn't face such competition - such as the monopolies enjoyed by most governments.

That doesn't necessarily mean that a private company will do a better job than the government. Take the concept of privatizing prisons. If running a prison was a legitimately competitive market, then you'd have an argument for privatizing them. However, the form 'privatization' of prisons takes is one where a private company has a single potential customer (the government) and that single customer does not grade them on effectiveness so much as lobbying pull.

The result is a situation where a private prison excels at the one area where it is forced to compete (lobbying the government) and doesn't pay much attention to any other aspect of effectiveness. Since most people would view lobbying as a relatively unimportant attribute for a prison, you don't really gain anything by privatizing prisons.

However, imagine we set up a system where a prisoner could freely transfer between any private prison in the nation and prisons were paid on a headcount basis. They wouldn't get paid if a prisoner escaped, so the state would still be a 'customer' to some extent. On the other hand, prisons would want to make themselves as attractive to prisoners as possible. They'd probably improve their food service and library, you'd see prisoner-on-prisoner or guard-on-prisoner violence drop, and so forth.

While these may not be attributes law-abiding citizens particularly desire in their prisons, it's almost certain that such prisons would be more 'efficient' at providing those needs for the prisoners than a purely state-run system.

The author actually gets it horribly wrong in one respect: he has no idea how to find an expert.

The problem with his proposed method - references - is that it is subject to a cascading failure of precisely the phenomenon discussed in the article. You have people with an overly high regard for their expertise that form a self-reinforcing group.

By the author's methods, parapsychology is a valid science. After all, pretty much every expert in parapsychology agrees it's a valid field. It's only those non-expert skeptics who criticize it.

Actually identifying expertise requires that you examine process. Experts are wrong all the time. But they're wrong in the "right" way. Their process is a functional one that could potentially lead to valid results.

badly worded stuff You've changed my mind. I want to say that is an excellent point; one that hadn't occurred to myself.

* After repeated edits: I can never remember which version of the formatting code Ars allows. Is there a defined list somewhere I can bookmark in which to reference?

Well said & thank you.

(In the interest of clarity, community and perception, there was no sarcasm nor insult intended but sincere respect.)

It's a better explanation for why people think businesses are more efficient than governments.

It might help to understand the concept of 'creative destruction'. When you look at 'business' in aggregate, you've got an essentially evolutionary process. Inefficient businesses fail, while efficient businesses thrive (to simplify a great deal). Because of the cutthroat competition they face, this process yields a result where the best businesses at any given time are far more efficient than an organization that doesn't face such competition - such as the monopolies enjoyed by most governments.

Capitalism is a method of delivery of services. "Business" isn't magical that it create the best or the smartest or the cheapest. The most profitable find a way to get a psudo-monopoly by either cornering markets or customer lock-in or patents or copyright. A resource is only worth as much as people are willing to pay for it, take energy as an example.

Government does a far better job with energy that private enterprise, why? because it takes a longer view and generally has the best interests of the populace they serve than corporations. Why build multi billion dollar facility when the value of your product goes up with scarcity and their is a large step up for any competition. The government will produce the product for a cheaper price nearly every time. I believe the best results would be from a government run non profit corporation.

In my opinion capitalism only works well when you have good regulation, as corporations will naturally get larger and larger cornering markets by growing into psudo-monopolies for market or customer lock-in. It does not make it cheaper.

For capitalism to work well there needs to be separation between different levels of supply. Air travel "de-regulation" (I would not call it that but it is commonly used) worked well because there is a separation between the airport ownership and the airline industry. If the airports were privately owned and could be owned by the airlines, then prices would go up, profits would go up, service would go down.

The reason the content supply (broadband) is weak is because there is customer lock-in. Both the pipes and the content are owned by the same company. The increased consolidation in the market will only push up prices to pay for said consolidation, with profits high, prices high, and service low. Make a separation between content delivery and the content suppliers and everyone would have better service at a more reasonable price.

Actually the European economy is a perfect example of a bunch of ignorant actors acting in what they think is their best interests and often working diametrically against those same interests. And the further difficulty in identifying what the correct direction is because it is so hard to tell the experts from the ignorant.

In general the voting public is idiotic when it comes to money (as can be identified by their personal financial habits). I make no claim to nation state scale expertise in economics, I am simply stating that I can identify a financial idiot by how they spend and manage their own money.

Separate the experts from the ignorant and you still have widely diverging opinions about the financial crisis. The poor incompetent voter, he must listen to these opinions and make a decision. Such is life.

Good point, and an interesting aside. Given that in general the business of government and economics is pretty complex, and that the vast majority of politicians have little or no expertise in anything other then telling people what they want to hear, AND they're overwhelmingly narcissistic extroverts, who therefore overestimate their own ability to manage the economy and improve matters for the nation, what is the voter to do? How can we judge between the qualified who underplay their ability, and the noisy incompetents?

Well if what i am reading around the net and elsewhere is correct, the neo-classical branch of economics is off the deep end. They ignore debt (in their view, one man's loan is based on another man's savings. This ignores banks ability to effectively print money by entering the loan as a deposit on the customer ledger) and money (they see it as just a go-between in a barter exchange. This in combo with their earlier mentioned view on debt makes them ignorant of the effect of banking debt money on prices), and consider every person in the market as a incarnation of Nostradamus (every actor in a market is seen as able to accurately predict the price movement of a arbitrary number of products for a arbitrary time into the future).

'the uninformed arent as doomed as the web suggests' who tf is 'the web'? 'drunken parents.. bruises' what tf is like drunken parents? what are bruises? this article/rant has the least fact, most hyperbole, most lost threads, most disjointed ideas of anything i've read on Ars. It must be a research article to measure the depth of the readership. if not, its just one of the least useful, least insightful, least organized articles ive stumbled into. and its 'featured' ?

wtf is 'doomed' ? its a net-tard rant of 'steamy porportions', and 'obvious bafoonery'. like 'hopped up bicylists', it drives 'too wanky'. 'down the path-street' of 'do-goodedness'.

can someone describe the point of this article? one takeaway is that to be incompetent and consider oneself not inompetent, just takes zero peer review, perhaps demonstrated in this article.

i thought initally this was a guest rant about 'idiots'. why pub this?

I actually learned about a related effect before stumbling onto the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Downing effect differs only slightly; it says that those with lower IQs tend to overestimate their own intelligence, while those with high IQs tend to underestimate their intelligence.

With our knowledge of the Dunning-Kruger and Downing effects, we can now possibly explain why government works the way it does...

It's a better explanation for why people think businesses are more efficient than governments.

For capitalism, free enterprise to effectively improve products and services, consumers must have a choice. In markets where choice can't be created, governments are essentailly very large buying clubs. Transparency and competance are key then. Neither are assured in a private monopoly. Witness the 'looming spectrum crisis' bs. never been, never will be a natural one in a free market. Gasoline, prices do not reflect oil supply, a 22 year high, nor consumption, a 10 year low. These are not American free market economic sectors.

Chris Lee / Chris writes for Ars Technica's science section. A physicist by day and science writer by night, he specializes in quantum physics and optics. He lives and works in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.